How to restore Exchange 2003 edb file from backup

I need to restore from backup an Exchange 2003 edb file so I can extract some old e-mail. The Exchange 2003 server itself is no longer in service. I'd perfer to redirect the files to a Windows 2008 Storage Server system with adequte drive space (and not in the OS (C:\) partition), but when I attempt to restore the file, instead of restoring files there, it creates a C:\$BackupExecDefaultData$\$ShadowCopyComponentsRedirection$\ folder structure. Which won't work since I don't have the 300GB of space on that C: drive.

Hmm slight concern here - when the backup of Exchange was done, was AOFO enabled? If AOFO is enabled that creates a snapshot backup of Exchange which does have some restore limitations if the version of Exchange is 2003.

Also BE has always had an active file exclusion against EDB files themselves - as such I assume that you did originally perform an Exchange agent backup and not attempt to just backup the edb from the file system?

. If Exchange 2003 backup was a non Snapshot backup then you can not restore it to a drive. This means edb files can not be restored as a flat files. The only option we have is to Install Exchange 2003, then create Recovery Storage Group and then restore the database to a Recovery Storage Group.